The American Egypt

Jesse Lerner’s experimental film The American Egypt (2001) focuses on the liberal history of the Yucatán Peninsula, Mexico, which, in addition to having had separatist aspirations, held one of the first socialist governments in the world for a brief period in the early twentieth century. By telling this story using archival images and texts of various origins, Lerner establishes implicit connections between the economic development of the region (originally based on Peonage, a system similar to slavery that allowed for the massive exploitation and export of the fiber of the henequen plant to the United States), and other events in the political history of Latin America that were directly related to the economic interests of North America in the rest of the continent.